December 27, 2014

So we’re into one year of this miserable City Council’s tenure now, and obviously I’ve been pretty quiet. But I have been quietly observing in the time since we lost City Manager Bernie Lynch and I have some very deep general impressions of the current administration and the so-called part-time weak Mayor.

One reason I went quiet, I think, is that eventually I would have sounded like a broken record. Complaining about the outrages and stupidity inflicted on us by the new olde guard would have gotten really tiresome quickly, even for me. I felt like I’ve been here before - watching crony hires and Councilors spitballing crazy motions with little actual consequence. I was weary, I’d seen it all before, and you do get ground down after a while.

But something I really have observed - besides a dislike of hard work by our new City Manager, who declared afternoons off for golf and who seems enjoy throwing his department heads under the bus - is the total, deafening lack of big vision with these people. There are no Patrick Murphys, or Bernie Lynches, and there are definitely no Paul Tsongas’s in the bunch.

Here’s some of the highlights of the last year:

- Trying to reduce or get rid of bike lanes. (Until outrage from the community stopped that cold, prompting Rita to tell us a little white lie about how she was “just trying to see if people cared.” Yeah, right.)
- Attempts to officially reduce the number of hours of paid meter parking downtown (which was inflicted on us by a downtown business Councilor, who should want more parking turnover, not less).
- Going after panhandlers. But just in downtown, of course, or more specifically, outside a certain Councilor’s empty dive bar. It has to be empty for a reason right? Patrons must be getting scared away by poor people asking for money! (Funny how Fuse doesn’t have this problem…they’re always packed…)
- Hiring a political City Manager with no managing experience, who then turned around and spent more money to hire a retired real City Manager, and who on several occasions managed to miss important fiscal deadlines (passing the buck notwithstanding). And if you don’t think KMurph doesn’t have a three-year-to-the-day pension-boosting expiration date on him, I have a bridge to sell you over the Merrimack…
- Going after Trinity Financial in an attempt to create a financial coup in rumored favor of some other developers. Trinity Financial has one of the best reputations in the state for urban development, so naturally, you want to get rid of them. Who needs long term thinking or commitment in Lowell for heaven’s sake??
- Trying to reroute the Bay State Marathon, because some people called. You know. Those people, the ones Rita listens to.
- Wanting to make public any surveillance of city employees out on disability, which would ensure that the surveillance is useless in trying to catch fraud against the city. Also, ignoring privacy and personnel laws to do it.
- Asking the state to let Lowell dissolve the need for a Chapter 17 stabilization fund because in the spring, Lowell used $2M from it to patch a deficit in Net School Spending and now Lowell’s new administration doesn’t want to have to pay it back any more.
- Asking the School Committee to develop a STEM curriculum for Lowell High School. Because you know, the School Committee is totally ignoring the schools…and needs the interference of the City Council.
- Snow removal. Always snow removal. This despite the fact Lowell has what amounts to a pretty well-oiled machine operation at this point, along with lots of new equipment from the last few years of capital investment.
- A city manager that doesn’t often bother to interview people for important positions, for job postings that often stay up a week or two at most. It’s hard work, administratin’. Just go with someone you know and that works, right?
- A motion that the ordinance against riding on the sidewalk should include the ability for police to seize skateboards - and bikes, Rita adds in. Over the objections of the police chief.
- Put Christmas lights on smokestacks. (Which are mostly private property as I recall…)
- Putting a stop to people stealing from Bud Caufield’s house. Because if it happened to Bud, it must be an ever increasing problem. Forget deploying police resources based on statistics! Bud got robbed dammit!!
- Gutless and powerless complaints against “newcomers [immigrant kids] in our schools” because they are expensive. Forget state and federal laws about education, we can ignore those…and this classic transcript from Belanger which astounded everyone.
- Violating Robert’s Rules and rules regarding what subcommittees can do, to spring big news on the rest of the Council about a failure to borrow monies on time via a subcommittee report:

Mayor Elliott begins to give a report on the finance subcommittee meeting of August 19, saying “if there are no objections I’ll give the report from here.” Councilor Martin says “I object” so Leahy takes the chair. Mayor proceeds with report from the floor. Auditor reported that former city treasurer had failed to borrow several million in funds for ongoing projects. There were deficits in various funds due to this. Consequently, there will be a negative free cash figure until the city can borrow the money on September 12 at which time there will be a large surplus of free cash. Also discussed was the operating deficit at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Regarding that, the manager will try to renegotiate portions of the management contract.

Councilor Martin says he appreciates the remedial measures by Mr. Healy and Baldwin but he doesn’t think the meeting was properly called, that it was called in violation of our rules and that’s so the council and the public has notice of what we will discuss. I saw the notice of this meeting; it was vague; I thought it was a mistake. I now think the notice was intentionally vague and that’s because the chairman knew they were not properly done without first going to the council. When I confronted the mayor about this he went to the newspaper and told some lies about what I said and I don’t appreciate that. It’s troubling to me that the person responsible for enforcing the rules (the mayor) violated those rules. Also would like in the future that information conveyed to the mayor be forwarded to all councilors which wasn’t done in this case. All matters that are to go to subcommittees must first come to the council. There was no emergency. It’s important that the entire council learn about something because that’s how the public learns about it.

Councilor Kennedy says to the Auditor that at the next meeting we’ll be two months into the fiscal year. I’ve asked for a bi-weekly report on how we’re doing. Auditor says she’ll send it out.

Mayor Elliott says he conducts business in an open forum. I’m not going to get bogged down in Robert’s Rules. We talked about closing the books for FY14 and we’re going to close that with a deficit because of this. It’s more important to me that we get things done rather than be nitpicky about things.

Councilor Mercier says earlier in this meeting Leahy moved to suspend the rules the mayor could have said it wasn’t on the agenda but he allowed it. Then you made a motion under suspension. That’s a double violation of the rules. I could have objected to it but I thought it was a good motion. Councilor Martin could have objected to that but he didn’t. Maybe there’s a meeting that shouldn’t be called for; well stay home. I keep quiet about the rules violations because I want the people to hear about it whether we’re in violation of the rules or not.

Councilor Martin: If the purpose of the meeting was to keep the public informed the purpose of the meeting should have been published ahead of time. I didn’t know about the purpose of the meeting until an hour beforehand.

Mayor Elliott: Councilor Martin just wants to slough off the importance of that meeting and get into a personality issue because he has a problem with me. That’s sad. We’re elected to do a job. The bottom line is there was a problem and I brought it forward. I’m not going to stick my head in the sand and wait for Councilor Martin to be ready.

- Harassing the legitimate operations of the methadone clinic. Seemingly on the complaints of one connected Dave Daly. Who is suing the city. But for some reason heavily involved in reelection campaigns of sitting mayors.
- Pushing hard to dictate that the School Department move its administration offices downtown (to bolster spending in dive bars, presumably) then complaining when they take a retail space for their needs in serving parents and students.
- Voting to support Artie T, a nice sentiment but it is inappropriate for a sitting political body to weigh in on a private business’ affairs. Also, a useless waste of time, with a lot of political grandstanding and puffery. (Note: I was with the workers who wanted ATD back; I just think this was a waste of time for the Council.)
- Demanding judges enforce state gun law and minimum sentences because this totally is something within the jurisdiction of the City Council. (That was sarcasm.)
- Requesting report on ratio of low income vs market rate housing in downtown, ostensibly to start a discussion on stopping more affordable housing. Too many poor people downtown means not enough patrons for the wicked fake irish bars there.
- Putting a youth curfew ordinance back into place despite the Supreme Court striking much of these things down. Infamous comment from Rita about eleven year old kids at night on bikes running drugs.
- Citations. Citations. Citations. I think it had to be some sort of record of them this last year.
- Banning fireworks which are already illegal. Requesting a special police task force to enforce it. Of course, this is already done, says the police chief. And, IMHO this was a totally ineffective exercise, because last summer was just as bad as the previous. So, another we-did-something-see waste of time.
- A discussion to attract a hotel to downtown Lowell. Because the last one did so well, it had to be bought out by a nonprofit University…Oh, and can Dave Daly develop it? He wants to develop it! (Then, why can’t he just DO that without help, if it’s such a great idea? What does he want, for the City to guarantee a certain number of bookings and to pay him for them if they don’t materialize?)
- Moving the high school out of downtown to…somewhere. Because this is also totally in the jurisdiction of the City Council. You know, that School Building Authority has nothing much to say about it…ruining South Common by putting the high school there seems like a good idea, maybe?
- Way more money to market the city’s dive bars — I mean, its businesses. Well specifically its downtown businesses. Because the city doesn’t do any of that. Ever.
- Constant. Discussions. About. Mayoral. Portraits. ‘Nuff said.
- Torpedoing appointments for boards and commissions just for being married to people Rita Mercier doesn’t like. (This sort of shenanigans stopped when Bernie left and with the hiring of KMurph, of course, because KMurph would never appoint someone associated with one of those mean, mean bloggers.)
- Illegal fundraising from the floor for restoration of religious statuary. Insisting on moving the manger back to city property - but if the “Jewish people think a menorah is part of their tradition” they were welcome to have one on city property too. Nothing yet on whether atheists or Satanists would be given the same courtesy, as it hasn’t been tested…yet.

Not listed here are the many petty or small things this Council passed, that can be somewhat useful, albeit again, lacking large vision. This is just the stuff I remember or found in notes and blog posts that demonstrate the sort of bogged-down-in-minutia and useless, ineffective leadership that we’ve come to expect from this session of our City Council.

In all my trolling through the notes and posts of this past year, I didn’t really find anything to wow me, that jumped out at me as vision. There are some initiatives that are going along as planned, like taking the next step in designing a trolley system, but these predate the current Council and administration, so I don’t consider them as Big Vision items that this Council can take credit for. All I know is that we got about what I expected, with some really unintentionally hilarious memes along the way. Kids on bikes dealing drugs, and newcomers in our schools…oh my! Stop those panhandlers and bring in the captive audience of the School Dept to save our downtown businesses!

Anyway, depressing. You can’t really wonder why I decided my personal life (like my new job, commute, and my family) were deemed a little more important in the last year. However, we’re heading into 2015, and it will be a local election cycle…so, the stakes, they are higher now, and I am a taxpayer here, after all. I can’t promise anything, except that with the Christmas season over and with less need to make handmade holiday gifts on my train commute, I just might decide to do a little more typing.

September 24, 2014

School Committee Member Kim Duggan Scott posted on the Facebook Group Lowell Live Feed a summary of the South Lowell/ Sacred Heart neighborhood group meeting last Monday. Be sure to check the link to read the comments too.

The newly-organized South Lowell/ Sacred Heart neighborhood group met on Monday, September 15th at Primitive Methodist Church, 1193 Lawrence Street, in the heart of the neighborhood. A special thank you is extended to Reverend Allen for sharing the church space with the community.

A number of varied items were on the agenda. But we began the evening with Public Safety.(more…)

May 4, 2014

As of last week, former blogger Gerry Nutter had resigned his Election Commission post. In his letter, which he sent out to bloggers as well, he cites work and health concerns as the reason. The Lowell Sun Column (you can go find the link if you really want to read it) decided it warranted a mention (it probably did) and then went on to infer that the real reason might be that some Councilors were working behind the scenes to oust him, going to the new City Manager with complaints.

While Gerry and I don’t always agree on everything, I do believe him. One thing you can’t accuse Gerry of is deliberate dishonesty. I had an email conversation with him when he sent out the news, and he really does think he cannot give the Commission justice due to his other obligations to his health and job.

As to whether, prior to the resignation, certain city councilors did go to the City Manager in a coincidental, but not related bid to get him to resign or fire him, maybe they did. Maybe they just say they did. I don’t know. However, the two are explicitly unrelated, and as Gerry notes on Facebook, no one came to him with any issues, and he did have actual free speech rights to say what he thought about sitting City Councilors even as an Election Commissioner.

Now, for the record, I actually think that the Election Commission is one place where even if you can say something about elected officials or candidates, you probably shouldn’t. The appearance of neutrality and impartiality is important for those who oversee our democratic elections. You all know that I certainly sympathize with Gerry’s frustrations about this Council! But maybe discretion would have been the better part of valor…not because the City Councilors deserve to remain uncriticized, but because of a higher goal of preserving and protecting our elections.

However, some of these same councilors have made hay over members of boards other than Elections Commission saying things on Facebook or elsewhere. It’s like they want to shut up as many critics as possible, and it’s the ones which they have official say over that are the targets they can reach. Can’t shut up the bloggers? Well at least shut up people who are serving, volunteering their own time and effort, on Lowell boards and commissions!

I have an idea for how you can avoid such criticisms in the future…stop pursuing positions and issues which are blatantly ridiculous!

By the way, I suspect that the councilors in question will be much more unhappy with a Gerry Nutter totally unleashed to say what he really thinks about them. Just sayin’.

April 30, 2014

Part the First: Digging for Gold

So a Council meeting happened tonight. With so much chocolatey goodness I hardly know where to start! If you want an accurate, but straightforward and boring recap of the meeting, Dick’s already got his notes up. I’m not calling Dick boring, his write up is great, and so useful. But. BUT.

In cycling, you move your pedals forward for anything to happen. But, sometimes when you’re bored, and you don’t need to push yourself for a bit, you might flip your pedals the other way - while coasting down a hill, say. It makes this pleasant empty clicky-whizzing sound. But the Council’s backpedaling tonight was a sight to behold! I could almost see the furious weightless reverse motion of pedals moving through space and time but affecting so little. Breathtaking. Unchained. Glorious! Like going backwards on your bike pedals and realizing that actually, you’re producing sunshine and ice cream and puppies by the motion!

In an effort to showcase my on-the-spot razor wit, this post will be punctuated with my live tweets at various points, which will help illustrate the pure singing joy the evening brought me. Plus, I’m lazy. Many of the tweets will be out of sequence as I try to make some sort of salient narrative. Follow me after the clicky bit: (more…)

April 28, 2014

So in case a Council meeting in which the destruction of brand new bike lanes isn’t enough fun for you (and a wonderful waste of taxpayer dollars already expended), there is also an Economic Development subcommittee meeting prior to the meeting, starting at at 5:30pm, where the parking ordinance will be discussed. Remember, this subcommittee is run by Corey Belanger, downtown businessman extraordinaire. Who, of course, believes he knows all the answers to downtown businesses’ woes. His latest blame game as to why his dive bar is emptier than he’d like? Those pesky parking fees on downtown street meters. The going “proposal” - I use that term loosely - is to go ahead and advertise the badly-kept secret that meters are not monitored past 4pm on weekdays and not at all on weekends. Just go ahead and make that official.

(As an aside…the thrice-bedamned PoS website is NOT updated with this term’s subcommittee membership. #majorwebsitefail)

Back to the subcommittee meeting…this is of course a totally wrongheaded and ill-informed direction for the parking ordinance. Belanger’s dive bar, the restaurants, the clothing stores, and the coffee shops…all rely on one really big thing to sustain an influx of paying customers: turnover. Downtown resident and neighborhood group secretary Corey Sciuto explains this a lot better in a letter he sent to the Council some time ago. (Worth a good reread.)

The fact that residents of the downtown know that after 4pm and on weekends there is no enforcement, means that a necessary turnover in parking, and hence of customers, comes to a complete halt in those timeframes. You know why I don’t go out to eat downtown at night or on weekends? Because I can’t find easy street parking. Why is that? Because downtown residents park and stay there for free, all evening and overnight, and all weekend. There’s no place to quickly hop out of the car, pay a small fee at a kiosk, and stay for the 15 minutes to 2 hours I can usually get my business done downtown. Once 5pm hits, a customer which wants to come in to shop or eat is screwed for street parking. Given a choice between the hassle of going on floor #4 of a parking garage blocks away from where I want to be, or going to find another place to eat outside of downtown, I often opt for the second one.

In essence, real experts in the field of economic development and revitalization indicate that we should be doing the exact opposite of what Belanger’s proposing, and actually enforce the night and weekend hours on the meters, and even extend it (maybe til 7 or 8pm, when the dinner crowd wants to come in, and on Sundays).

This is a simple concept and yet, despite the fact this is a well-known city planning rule of thumb, and that it’s been explained a zillion times, the self-appointed economic development expert just refuses to see it.

Hey look, I get it, you wanna look like you have big ideas. A sweeping vision. Funny how that comes across as entirely self-serving…and less like a vision and more like throwing shit on a wall to see what sticks…but you wanna be seen as the big man in town with lots of new ideas. Problem is, your ideas are going to sink us, real fast. This one, and the rest of the ones you’re kicking around.

The real heart of the problem is that the average IQ of this Council is just not that high. Intellectual curiosity? Heavily weighing the opinions of real experts? Thinking things through to their logical conclusion? Nah. The majority of these people will go with their uneducated gut. Real experts be damned.

I swear, this City Council is hell bent on making the City of Lowell look totally ridiculous in the eyes of our sister cities across the Commonwealth. No one can take this Council seriously. It’s gonna be a long two years, folks.

April 26, 2014

Hey, hey, it’s the 1950’s. The Age of the Highway and Automobile. Right?

So you say it’s over sixty years from that decade…well, you live in Lowell. We like to stick to what worked decades ago. Suck it, bikers/public transit commuters.

Mayor Rodney Elliott and City Councilor Rita Mercier have filed a motion for Tuesday’s meeting requesting that the council vote to revert Father Morissette back to four lanes of traffic and have the bike lanes removed.

The faulty argument is that traffic is worse due to the Boulevard going from four to two lanes. This shows a fundamental disinterest in the facts of the matter, which is that any traffic you might see on FM is due to lights and bridges, which would back up regardless of having two or four lanes. I’ve been on FMB at many different times of day…the traffic studies which the DPD conducted previously seem to bear up, in my experience, so where is the sudden need to open up a Boulevard which barely gets a quarter of its use capacity, even with only two lanes?

Really, this isn’t about traffic, or public safety. That’s just window dressing on the real pissing contest that’s going on here. This is all about going backwards on the Lynch era, with a bonus for undoing any good or progress supported or proposed by former Mayor Patrick Murphy. This is the same impulse which is behind this amazing new urgency about moving the high school (though that also has “friendly developers” written all over it).

Let’s please not pretend this is about having a big grand vision. It’s more like the black hole opposite of having vision.

So, in a related matter and in case you missed it…and you want to keep yourself entertained while watching City Council meetings…you should check out the new drinking games at the BadgermillCity wiki. There are two games listed there so far - the Plain Jane drinking game, and the new “Elimination Libation” game, which is more of a get-buzzed-quick game whenever one of these “bassackwards” subjects come up. I think you’ll find yourself entertained just reading them!

April 16, 2014

Who here is a fan of the HBO series, Game of Thrones? The world of the books/series revolves around the utter instability and chaos, war, and madness that is brought about by Westeros’ sudden and not-quite-accidental regime change. King Baratheon might not have been the smartest or the best king ever, but his demise heralds the end of the relative peace of the Seven Kingdoms, with his queen’s non-Baratheon bastard children vying with other contenders for the Iron Throne, and the whole countryside erupting in war. Other families take advantage of the chaos to carve out and reclaim their little kingdoms which had been absorbed long ago. Still others just like to party by judicious use of castration and torture, mostly for fun.

Well, folks, take away the castration and violence (but not the drinking) and you have Lowell city politics right now.

Every decision made in the last seven years by past City Councils and the former CM is up for grabs, apparently. No matter how stringent the public involvement in deciding on plans for various projects in the city, be that the very preliminary, not-our-goddamned-decision high school reno or rebuild, or the much-lauded plans for the historic South Common, or any Master Plan element of bike paths or city street realignment or other projects already in the works.

I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if this City Council wanted a redo on the Appleton Mill artist lofts or the Early garage. I mean, hey, we could tear down or repurpose those things and hand them over to your buddies, right?

Supposedly, we have high level experts on the Council now on economic development. What I want to know, is how running a dive bar makes one qualified to build a high school? Or decide that street parking should have less turnover by not enforcing the meters? To me, every word that comes out of Corey Belanger’s mouth showcases a total and absolute lack of understanding of economic development and municipal management. Far be it for experts to have an opinion; Corey is on the job now, so Lowell is gonna make a turnaround. A renaissance. All of the downtown vacancies will be filled by the time his first term is over!

Or, wait. Businesses - small ones, and large ones - like stability when they make their business decisions. They like to know that the plans that were carefully made by transparent and open means, by a crew of amazing (now mostly fled) Planning and Development officials, will be carried out in a timely fashion. It’s no big secret that a lot of plans in Lowell were on hold during the Cox era and were put back on the front burner by the Lynch administration. Now, we’re going to reverse years worth of planning, public participation, and decision making because Corey Belanger wasn’t fucking paying attention during all of that?

Plans can change. Don’t get me wrong. We should be flexible. And I do not have a horse in the very silly race about the high school staying in or moving from downtown. There are merits on both sides. However, my understanding of the process as outlined by a state agency called Massachusetts School Building Authority is that they are the entity that gets to weigh all the factors. What the local idiots on Council can do, by waffling, is take us off the shortlist, which we cannot afford. The high school is in need of either rebuilding or renovating, soon. And “soon” is relative, since getting on the MSBA’s short list means it’ll still take years to go through final decision making. And oh yeah, they, not us, make that final determination about renovation vs. building a new building elsewhere. Based - GASP! - NOT on whatever private developer wants to build something (god knows what, they have yet to say) on the existing high school site, BUT…based on what is best for the students and their education.

I know, shocking.

So who wins in this Game of Postpones? Well, not the students, if Corey Belanger gets his way as an apparently honorary member of the School Committee and of the MSBA. PS - apparently, Mistah Mayah also has an extremely short memory, since all of this planning and participation and discussion happened while he was a City Councilor. So, either he’s dumb and doesn’t remember, or he never really paid any attention to what was going on in the city for the last seven years. Neither explanation is encouraging.

February 10, 2014

Normally I would say that I watched the Zoning Board of Appeals meeting tonight so you wouldn’t have to, but…if you didn’t see it, you missed out on a hell of a lot of entertainment value. I’m speaking, of course, of the massage special permit hearing for Mill No 5.

It started out with Jim Lichoulas speaking as the developer of the building. You could feel his frustration with the opposition, when he talked about how Randy Mathieu [note: name corrected] had thrown around words like “happy endings” and “human trafficking” in regards to Mill No 5 and massage tenants. Later, Randy, speaking in opposition, claimed Lichoulas was exaggerating. It was not long after that that Lichoulas’ partner spoke, and read an email from Randy with those exact accusations in it. Pure, classic political entertainment.

Couple that with Councilor Rita Mercier who spoke, confused about whether or not she was in opposition or whether or not she could produce a motion…well, I hope to get video to you soon.

As for Mercier’s time at the podium, I will say this: her confusion about whether to be in opposition stemmed from talking to people at the meeting and getting that other side of the story. You know, the side which wasn’t throwing around baseless accusations. Something she apparently did not do before putting a motion on the agenda for the Council meeting tomorrow night. *facepalm*

The ZBA impressed me with its thoughtful, respectful yet firm discussion on this matter. Seeing that all this was really much ado about made-up crap, it was a pretty long discussion. The request for special permit passed, with some minor conditions, like a three month review. If I can get you some cut-down video I will!

There was a lot of discussion on Facebook around this item, so Christopher starts out with quotes from that discussion. His post highlights organizations that have in interest in economic revitalization downtown, and also the history of the last 12 years of master plans and studies.

I very much suggest Christopher’s post be required reading for the entire City Council before tomorrow night’s meeting…it’s that good. There is a ton of context and some good, solid suggestions. It raises very important questions, and I think the Councilor who can speak credibly to those issues will be light years ahead of everyone else. If a Councilor want to sound really intelligent, they should bring a copy of his post to the City Council meeting tomorrow night!

February 9, 2014

It’s that time of the week again! This Tuesday’s agenda looks quite entertaining. Besides the motions I’ve already gone through, there are a couple more I’d like to poke holes in–er, I mean, take a look at, if I have time to post about them before the meeting. But meanwhile, place your guesses in comments, same rules as always: one guess per person, one agenda item per guess, and the more obscure or unpredictable the item, the bigger the prize.

joe from lowell I posted in the comments of the last BotW results post, answering your question about your prize. I deem you ineligible for this week’s BotW - let someone else win! Meanwhile, confirm your choice for your prize and I’ll get on that!

PS - let us hope they don’t take this Executive Session out of order again. Please, let them have learned their lesson…

This week’s agenda:

1 MAYOR’S BUSINESS
1.1 Citations – (1)Stephen Paris and (1)Matthew Sheehan; City of Lowell, 911 Dispatchers who assisted residents on Cabot St. December 12, 2013, out of a burning building, while off duty.
Citations – (1)Domenique Riviera and (1)Noelia Aquino; Lifeguards for lives they saved last summer.

2 CITY CLERK
2.1 Minutes of City Council Meeting February 4th and Special Meeting February 3rd, for acceptance.

10 CITY COUNCIL - MOTIONS
10.1 C. Kennedy – Req. Finance SC recommend appropriate salary for Acting City Manager and Acting City Clerk.
10.2 C. Belanger – Req. City Council request Mayor appoint a downtown economic development task force.
10.3 C. Mercier – Req. City Mgr. have proper department provide a report as to current status and future proposed plans for Mill #5 building on Jackson St. located in the Hamilton Canal District.
10.4 C. Mercier – Req. City Mgr. have proper department explore the possibility of establishing a portion of McDermott Reservoir on Beacon St. as a site for a portion of a Community Garden for the Friends of the Reservoir.
10.5 C. Mercier – Req. City Mgr. have proper department inspect glass in windows in all downtown buildings for safety.
10.6 M. Elliott – Req. City Council discuss ordinance pertaining to accumulated annual vacation and sick leave policy and refer matter to Personnel SC.
10.7 M. Elliott – Req. City Auditor provide report on costs of accumulated annual vacation and sick leave for employees who have resigned or have retired since January 1, 2014.

11 CITY COUNCIL - EXECUTIVE SESSION
11.1 Executive Session to discuss and release minutes of Executive Session meeting on January 21, 2014 and any other minutes that should be designated to be made public from executive sessions.
11.2 Executive Session regarding litigation report, public discussion of which could have a detrimental effect on the City’s position.